[R] Size of plots in pdf files#can it be smaller?

[Henrik Bengtsson]

No (destructive) JPGs - they are evil (draw a line as see for
yourself) and should be banned from publications (only useful for
pictures/photos).  Use PNGs for you plots if you don't like vector
graphics.  /H

On Mon, Sep 7, 2009 at 5:00 PM, jim holtman<jholtman at gmail.com> wrote:
> The reason for the size of the file is that when generating a PDF,
> commands are generated to plot "each" point.  I generated a PDF file
> with 10,000 and there were 10,000 of lines similar to the following:
>
> 159.93 349.01 1.00 1.00 re f
> 343.19 283.07 1.00 1.00 re f
> 427.86 323.58 1.00 1.00 re f
> 431.68 230.08 1.00 1.00 re f
> 93.79 278.89 1.00 1.00 re f
> 425.78 332.10 1.00 1.00 re f
> 332.04 366.16 1.00 1.00 re f
> 78.55 305.61 1.00 1.00 re f
> 277.22 135.42 1.00 1.00 re f
> 423.47 101.07 1.00 1.00 re f
> 435.86 289.67 1.00 1.00 re f
>
> My question is why do you need so many points?  Have you looked at
> 'hexbin' as way of plotting the data?  Have you considered generating
> 'jpg' output which will be much smaller; e.g. a jpg file with 10,000
> points was 70K and one with 100,000 was 90K -- it only created the
> pixels to be plotted.
>
> On Mon, Sep 7, 2009 at 7:43 AM, Christian
> Ritter<christian.ritter at uclouvain.be> wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I have to produce arrangements of 25 simple plots of the type
>> plot(x,y,pch=".") where there are typically on the order of 20000 points.
>> So, overall, I have about 500000 points. When I use the pdf device, I get
>> file sizes (on a Windows machine) of about 10 MB.
>> When I then zip the files, I'm down to about 0.5MB, so the original pdf
>> files were created with a lot of 'air'.
>> I'm wondering why the pdf files are so large and whether there is an
>> alternative to produce them smaller. Any ideas?
>>
>> Have a nice afternoon,
>>
>> Chris.
>>
>> ______________________________________________
>> R-help at r-project.org mailing list
>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
>> PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
>> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>>
>
>
>
> --
> Jim Holtman
> Cincinnati, OH
> +1 513 646 9390
>
> What is the problem that you are trying to solve?
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-help at r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>